Well, as someone told me today, I’m diving in headfirst. I have a wedding, the normal Sunday service and a funeral within three days.
And I’m already tired.
Please pray for my stamina through this weekend.
I’ll do the follow-up on yesterday’s “Part 1″ post in a few days.
Dr. Scot McKnight of North Park Theological Seminary/North Park University in Chicago has recently completed a series of blog entries analyzing the widely-used “Four Spiritual Laws” put out by Campus Crusade for Christ.
He articulates much of my personal uncomfortability with the Laws by comparing them to Jesus’ model of ministry – that of proclaiming the Kingdom. Primarily, he addresses two concerns I’ve had for a while: the individualist perspective on the Gospel and the reduction of “The Fall” to individual sin.
I highly recommend reading McKnight’s generous critique of The Four Spiritual Laws. The posts in question can be found in the following locations:
You’re a college student. You’ve got five classes, a membership in a frat, work 15 – 20 hours a week, and are dating a cute girl in the sorority across campus. You study when you can; you sleep even less.
So when it comes down to going to class, you have to make some choices: get an extra hour or two of sleep, or go to class. If you’re keeping things decently in balance, you skip one or two classes a week. No big deal. You’ve got 9 more class hours you actually are there.
So which ones do you pick? Which ones do you attend, which ones do you skip? It all comes down to involvement. If your class is one of those big, lecture-type classes, you’re more likely to skip it. Large lecture classes involve a lot of passivity on the part of students. Just sitting and listening doesn’t engage people enough to make class seem worthwhile. Moreover, the professor (who probably doesn’t even grade your work, that’s done by assistants) doesn’t even know who you are nor does he care.
To combat passivity, lecture-style classes feature discussion sections of (typically) under 20 students (most are 8 – 15) where quizzes are administered and discussion of material by students is the main content. In the end, though, even this is not enough to get students out of bed to go to lecture on the average day. Now, the day prior to the big test, well, that’s a different story.
No, students who have to prioritize time for going to class and determine which ones to skip base their decisions on how engaging the class is. (more…)
…when there are maple trees growing out of them.
Ah, the maple trees! There are maple trees all over my neighborhood. Many of them are quite large. They give the neighborhood a mature feel – not like some of those new subdivision “pyramids in the desert” situations we see (especially in flatlander country).
Well. The maple trees ceased dropping their little half-propeller seeds a few weeks ago, and it seems that the majority of them that did not fall into my yard and germinate fell into my gutters and did the same. Actually, in two locations enough of the durn seeds fell into the gutters and stuck that they provided the sole base of humus for an entire mass of maple trees to germinate and begin to grow.
Now, I’m an admirer of nature probably more than the average man. Nevertheless, the prospect of awakening one morning to see the tap-root of a maple tree emerging from my bedroom ceiling via the gutter and the eaves was not all that appealing.
So, I hiked up on my roof this evening and cleaned them out. I know, now’s the time you expect me to describe some incredibly serendipitous mishap or freak act of nature. Regrettably, I have none to share this time ’round.
And now, since this is a blog, and since on blogs stories don’t have to have a point or even be interesting, I guess the story’s over. “And that’s all I have to say about they-at.”
You know you’ve gotten too used to using VI when you attempt to save your blog post by typing esc and then :w.
If you didn’t understand that last sentence, don’t worry about it.
Ok, so this is what I call creative action in crisis, or as we would have said at Koin, “ballsy.”
NAIROBI – A 73-year-old Kenyan grandfather reached into the mouth of an attacking leopard and tore out its tongue to kill it, authorities said Wednesday.
Peasant farmer Daniel M’Mburugu was tending to his potato and bean crops in a rural area near Mount Kenya when the leopard charged out of the long grass and leapt on him.
M’Mburugu had a machete in one hand but dropped that to thrust his fist down the leopard’s mouth. He gradually managed to pull out the animal’s tongue, leaving it in its death-throes.
I have four syndication feeds for this blog: RSS 2.0, ATOM, RDF, and RSS 1.0. So far, none of my posts from yesterday have made it onto those feeds via bloglines. The two that I can test from here seem to be working, with the correct, updated data.
Any ideas what’s going on?
Today is the longest day of the year. That is, there are more daylight hours today in the Northern Hemisphere than there are on any other day.
Official Warren, OH Sunrise/Sunset times for today from WeatherUnderground.com are:
Sunrise: 5:50 AM EDT
Sunset: 8:59 PM EDT
Given this astronomically significant day, I’d like to highlight one of the links in the sidebar to the right: the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA, or APOD for short.
Check it out for some great photogrophy, updated daily!
Forty-one years to the day three civil rights workers were ambushed and killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob, a jury found former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen guilty of all three counts of manslaughter Tuesday.
It took 41 years, but finally the ringleader of this brutal killing has been convicted of manslaughter. I guess you could say I’m disappointed they didn’t convict him of murder since that’s what it was. I am glad that James Chaney’s family feels satisfied by the verdict. It is they and the families of the other two victims that need the closure and the satisfaction.
I was still distressed by the footage of Killen’s departure from the court under guard. He showed no remorse, and angrily shoved reporters’ microphones aside as he was wheeled to his police transport. Although he could face three 20-year sentences, I don’t think anyone will say that either (a) justice has been served by this or (b) serving his sentence will allow us to consider him “rehabilitated”.
Why hasn’t justice been served? There are still many people out there, in that Mississippi county and beyond, who still haven’t stood trial for their actions. This conspiracy of silence between the perpetrators and their sympathizers defies the progress we have made in bringing equal rights to all. These people, too, need to stand trial for these brutal murders. Furthermore, justice has not been served because no one can restore the loss of life these three experienced nor can anyone restore the loss of life and livelihood experienced by all those whose civil rights continued to be trampled by the Klan and others, spurred on by the actions of Killen and his mob. Nor must we lull ourselves into thinking that by rendering this verdict, racism in America is dead: which leads to my second point.
Our justice system claims to cause a degree of rehabilitation in society’s offenders. Serving a jail term, doing community service, paying a fine, etc., is considered to be sufficient to call a case closed. Yet it does not speak to the true issue: the heart of Edgar Ray Killen. His sentence, however long or short, will not in itself bring Killen to a place of repentence, confessing his actions as wrong and sinful, where he seeks forgiveness for real wrongs done to real people, many of whom he has never met – those whom the systemic evil he supported has victimized.
He does not come across as the least penitent for what occurred. Although he was at one point a Baptist minister, he does not seem to have found it in his heart to be able to see those with African ancestry as his equals either in the sight of God or in the sight of the law of this country.
No, not until he confesses his sins before God and to those whom he has victimized will we be able to say that this verdict has brought justice to bear in his life. May he do so soon, or may God have mercy upon him!
Perhaps I don’t have anything to say other than that title: but really, some days are thoroughly exhausting.
Some days you have the same conversations over and over because you have to assess a crisis (or other time-dependent situation) and then you have to shop a solution to the constituencies, resolve to take action, make a decision, and then draw all of the constituencies back into the solution. This cyclical process involves a good deal of repetition.
For me, repetition is tiring. Whether repetition involved explaining how a certain aspect of our computer system worked (while at Uni High) to different people at different times, or whether it was explaining why we had to take a certain action to resolve a conflict at Koin, or whether it was explaining the facts of a situation that had been misinterpreted, misunderstood or just plain garbled, repetition has always been an exhausting part of the leadership process.
Nonetheless, it is an essential part of the leadership process. On the one side, we call it “vision-casting,” a leadership role that is essential to all who are trying to get a group of people to move (together) in a certain direction. In a way it’s like changing a tire on a car: when you mount the tire, you tighten one bolt, then skip one, tighten the next one, skip one, tighten the next one, etc., going around the entire set of five at least twice. This keeps the tire balanced and mounted squarely on the axle.
Repetition in leadership is often like that. We find ourselves re-tightening screws we originally got as tight as we could get them, since we have been around the tire and tightened a few more. Around and around we go, until everything is sufficiently tied down.
Repetition’s essentiality does not make it any less tiring. That being said, the time has come for me to rest.
Sermon 19 June 2005
5 Pentecost Proper 7, Year A
Romans 6:1 – 11
“Sin Management”
Though it is Father’s Day, I promised the Executive Board that I would not give a sermon on Fatherhood or Parenting, since I am not a Father myself and I have only experienced Parenting on the receiving end. Nonetheless, inspired by the fact that we have had children around all week with VBS and in this service this morning, I’d like to relate a story from my childhood that, I believe, will speak to the passage we just heard from Romans.
When my two brothers and I were very young, we wore ties to church. But we didn’t wear “real ties.� We wore those “clip-on� ties that had a metal clasp that hooked over the shirt collar so that it looked like a four-year-old, a six-year-old and an eight-year old had tied perfect specimens of a half-Windsor knots. Two of us didn’t mind wearing ties. But my youngest brother hated them. Even before mom got the clip-on tie attached, Paul would struggle and carry on as if he were being gagged. “Mom, it’s choking me,� he would say.
(more…)
Ok, so I said it. Down in the comments on one of yesterday’s posts, I said it. And I mean it.
So now I’ve got to defend it. 
For the clickably challenged, I’ll repeat what I said here:
“Intergenerational� is a hotbutton for me: I believe that crossing generational barriers so that we can all worship as one people of God is on the scale of importance with crossing racial and socioeconomic barriers in contemporary society.
We are the one people of God; I believe that faithfulness to God by all involved will lead us to a place of convergence from which we can move forward together, following God as one people.
For the moment, I feel I am the intergenerationality in our congregation.
Why is intergenerationality so important? Age cohorts create a false distinction between people based on age marketed to us so that people can sell us [stuff] (expletive deleted) by playing us off each other. It is a fabrication of otherness that despises both the experience of the past and the vitality of the present and the hope for the future.
Like issues of race, socioeconomic status or culture, “age-ism” allows us to use our God-given diversity as leverage against each other. As we hear over and over again in the New Testament, using anything to leverage ourselves against others to declare our goodness will end up destroying us, because the only way we are declared “good” is through Jesus Christ. Period.
This is why, for the time being, I have chosen to work with a congregation that has a significant average age divergence from me. The church of Jesus Christ will be able to persevere much more hardily if we have the ability to integrate both young and old together, despite what our cultural marketing might say.
This is why, for the time being, I have chosen not to pursue the creation of a “contemporary service” at First Baptist Warren. It is important that the young learn to worship God with the old. It is equally important that the old learn to worship with the young. Each has something to offer the other. By maintaining the dichotomy, by upholding the false distinction, as we do with issues of race, culture and socioeconomic status, we spit in the face of Christ on the cross.
Instead, I have chosen a route that will likely create a good deal of dissatisfaction before buy-in can occur: with regards to style, we will be eclectic, taking the best music, the best tradtions and the best understandings of every decade and melding them together into one convergent experience. The style will change. No doubt about that. But the original will not disappear, will not be subsumed. Rather it will be integrated into something that allows its strengths to be put on display while its weaknesses are supported by other facets of the work we will be doing.
The content will continue to be Jesus Christ: born, alive among us, crucified, dead, buried, risen, ascended and returning. The structure will continue to have its four parts: Gathering, Word, Table and Dismissal.
Don’t get me wrong: there are many places where “contemporary worship” has been the path of faithfulness to God. There are many places where it continues to be. Given our position here, however, it could be self-destructive.
Intergenerationality is essential to the life of the church. Without it we have no continuity with the faithful followers of Jesus Christ going all the way back to Peter and Andrew, James and John, and all the rest. With it, we can build on the strengths that each age cohort brings to the table so that all may grow into maturity in Christ.
The Peace of the Lord be always with you!
When I was a part of a transitioning ministry a few years ago, ministry leaders had a lot of conversations about how we were restructuring ourselves. There were a lot of issues involved in how we developed structures and our attitudes toward them. One of those ministry leaders reminded me several times of how we relate to our leadership structures:
The structures serve us, not us the structures.
In other words, the structures of our organizations are the tools we use to enable and empower the work we are supposed to be doing. When those structures begin to pinch, to impede the work we are supposed to be doing, then restructuring (whether tweaking or complete overhaul) becomes necessary.
Unfortunately, over time, through use, structures become increasingly rigid and inflexible. Even this isn’t necessarily problematic: a good example would be a concrete bridge, like one sees over the highways all over this country. A concrete bridge derives its strength from its rigidity. A concrete bridge that flexes and shakes and moves and bends would not feel safe nor be able to carry as heavy loads as a rigid one. Nonetheless, even a concrete bridge requires expansion joints, to make room for the minor adjustments of heat and cold, dampness and drought that affect the bridge.
The problem with rigidity arises when circumstances change such that new stresses and loads are put on the structure in places and at angles that the structures were not designed to handle. In those cases, the structural collapse becomes imminent and is catastrophic when it occurs.
All around us, for a list of reasons longer than I can relate here, a whole new list of circumstances have come on the scene, which our current structures are unable to handle – within the church and within society at large. When we are rigidly inflexible with our structures, we will discover that, far from being able to transform the rest of the world, forcing it to conform to our structure, instead we will discover that the pressures from the outside will destroy us and do so catestrophically. Whether we are rigidly traditional or rigidly free-form (such as with many in the emerging church movement), we will discover ourselves caught dealing with ill-equipped structures.
Nevertheless, the good news is that we are not made of concrete. We are made of flesh and bone. We are inherently mobile and adaptable. We are, by nature, creative. True, while unused muscles atrophy and unused (or overused) joints stiffen, rehabilitation is possible to allow us to restructure so that all we do may be done with poise and grace, moving to the beat of the Spirit, dancing to the creative tune of our Creator, in whom we live and move and have our being – structures and all: Amen.
Step 1: Before the Printing Press, there were no “Bible Studies” as we know them. Christian growth occured through brief pre-approved sermons, through viewing the Bible Stories through the Stained-glass windows and statues and through relationships.
Step 2: The Printing Press allowed for Bible Studies (once the Reformation, whose literature it disseminated, gained strength)
Step 3: “Bible Studies” and Sunday School became the primary (if not the sole) means of Christian growth as the Reformation grew. The Reformation destroyed most of the stained-glass windows and the statues formerly used as a means of Christian growth.
Step 4: Right now we are undergoing another shift in cultural communication commesurate with the advent of the Printing Press through the ascendency of personal computing and the Internet. (Or, in other words, Internet-connected computers are changing the entire way we do business and communicate, even for those who do not themselves have Internet-connected computers. This is a transformation that has as great a magnitude as the Printing Press.)
Step 5: The Internet is allowing for the growth of the so-called Emergent Conversation within the church: an internetworked, interlocking, international conversation whereby Christian leaders are being trained, the church is growing (rapidly) and Christian growth is occurring.
Step 6: What’s next? Who knows? What will the church look like? What dominant patterns will emerge for Christian growth? What do we do with the old patterns? How will all this fit together?
Let’s discuss this. Click on “comments” below to add your $0.02 or more…
I would like to suggest (and I won’t be the first to have done so) that the greatest threat to Christianity in North America is democratic capitalism. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a political statement. It’s simply an observation that while we pay lip service to Jesus Christ, we bow down at the altars of Mammon.
This provocative statement encourages us to examine what we perceive to be our culture. When we focus on culture being the three m’s (movies, music and morality), we leave out the main event – the structure of economics that allows for the three m’s to flourish and to shape society.
